Forcing Freedom

Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?

Ronald Bailey, Christopher Preble, Christopher Hitchens & Ivan Eland from the August/September 2003 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Horrific blowback from terrorists reacting to interventionist U.S. foreign policy is now the biggest threat facing the country. The terrorists say, and polls of Arabic and Islamic public opinion confirm, that U.S. interventionist foreign policy -- not U.S. culture or economic and political freedoms -- is the cause of terrorist strikes against U.S. targets. Attacking foreign countries raises hatred of the United States in the world, increases retaliatory terrorism, and thereby ultimately increases -- not reduces, as Bailey claims -- U.S. government intrusion into civil liberties at home.

Because of such ill effects on government activism at home, the nation's founders advocated staying out of foreign wars. They learned from history that wars lead to bigger government and the accumulation of power by the ruler. James Madison said it best: "Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

In the 20th century, war was the primary cause of U.S. government growth, and not just in areas related to national security. Massive government intrusion into civil society during World War I provided a precedent -- as well as administrators and renamed government programs -- for the Depression-era expansion of the state. Restraining U.S. government intervention internationally is fundamental to reducing the role of the state domestically, and government coercion abroad is as immoral as it is at home.

It is puzzling that "libertarian" interventionists are skeptical of state activism at home -- where the U.S. government has at least some legitimacy -- yet have great faith that Uncle Sam can successfully conduct social engineering abroad, where he has no legitimacy. Furthermore, opening markets at gunpoint isn't free trade. Some libertarians, possessing an affinity for the right, find it difficult to move away from the right's bread-and-butter issue -- a statist, interventionist foreign policy and concomitant bloated defense budgets. All U.S. presidents since World War II -- not only Reagan -- intervened excessively in strategically marginal areas of the world in the name of fighting communism. Such puttering around at the edge of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence to sap its resources undoubtedly had less of an effect on communism's collapse than its nonviable and grossly inefficient economic and social system.

Bailey goes out of his way to praise Ronald Reagan -- a president who increased government spending faster than Bill Clinton and who, in his proxy war against the Soviets in the unimportant backwater of Afghanistan, created one of the few threats to the American mainland and way of life in the history of the republic. Bailey refers to this monster, now called Al Qaeda, as one of the "regrettable side effects" of Reagan's heroic Cold War struggle. But Reagan's intervention, instead of moving Afghanistan toward democracy, strengthened a proxy that became the devil incarnate. Such unintended and counterproductive blowback from unnecessary wars may be one of the best reasons not to get involved in them. Instead of using coercion unbecoming of a republic, the best way to help other nations onto the path of freedom is to lead by example.

Ivan Eland is director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, and author of Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World (Praeger).

Fighting for the Rule of Law

Ronald Bailey

Christopher Preble and Ivan Eland want to avoid U.S. military adventures abroad and the creation of a national security state at home. So do I. Naturally, they agree with the first two pillars of my proposed libertarian foreign policy: expand global free trade and lead by example, showing foreigners how our free institutions operate at home. We're all for "peaceful voluntary exchange." We all also acknowledge the right of the United States to self-defense. So far, so good. But then they apparently think I am advocating "perpetual war" and "an empire of force." Not at all. Nor am I in favor of an open-ended War on Terrorism.

Preble asks, "If libertarians are opposed to government action to make a perfect domestic world, why discard those principles beyond the water's edge?" Because those principles can't and don't apply to relations among nation-states. Individual liberty exists within the context of the rule of law and limits on government power, i.e., constitutional liberalism. As earnestly as one might wish it otherwise, there is no such thing as the rule of law among states. While it seems unlikely that any state (other than perhaps North Korea) would directly attack the United States, it is undeniable that many illiberal regimes are ideological breeding grounds for enemies of liberal democratic capitalism, and some even offer safe harbor for groups that do plan to physically attack the United States. Most libertarians would agree that the U.S. liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban regime that was giving refuge to Al Qaeda terrorists was clearly justified on grounds of self-defense.

Preble also accuses me of wanting to "force democracy down the throats" of people living under tyrannical regimes. Again, not so. Instead, I am calling for the revival of the Reagan Doctrine. President Reagan defined it this way in his February 1985 State of the Union address: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives...on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua...to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense." The Soviet Union has been tossed into the dustbin of history, but there are still plenty of people willing to risk their lives fighting against their own tyrants to secure for themselves the blessings of liberty. It should be our policy to help them. Setting aside a discussion of the merits of the war with Iraq, it would have been a wiser policy to have earlier trained and supported Iraqi rebels to overthrow the Ba'athist regime.

Preble believes I underestimate the state's capacity to hold onto power once an alleged emergency has passed. That's certainly a valid concern. But a policy of supporting liberal insurgencies will eliminate national security as a rationale for expanding state power at home. The immediate aftermath of the Cold War is instructive here. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the fact is that the U.S. did substantially "demobilize our armies, scrap our ships, and leave our airplanes to bake in the desert." For example, active duty U.S. Army forces were cut by about 40 percent in the 1990s, and the U.S. Navy is down from 594 ships in 1989 to around 300 today. Yes, as Preble notes, "the state will always find new justifications for its existence," but recent experience shows that America's liberal democracy is capable of containing its military when perceived threats to our national security recede. Consider further that the post-Cold War defense budgets of most European countries are still declining as the peaceful economic and political integration of that continent proceeds. (By the way, nowhere do I advocate an increase in the U.S. defense budget.)

Ivan Eland notes that transforming societies the U.S. military has invaded recently -- e.g., Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- into republics has not been very successful so far. The chief problem is that few people in those places are committed to liberalism; they remain essentially tribal loyalists. The goal of a libertarian foreign policy is to train insurgents first in liberalism and then in military competencies. Tyrants throughout history have appealed to tribalism and its modern incarnation, nationalism, to justify their rule. Liberalism breaks the bonds of tribe and teaches people who disagree how to live peaceably together. There would be no need for a War on Terrorism in a world of liberal commercial republics.

"Attacking foreign countries raises hatred of the United States in the world," Eland claims. Maybe so, but attacking countries is not the goal of a libertarian foreign policy; helping people liberate themselves is. Eland also claims "libertarian interventionists" have "great faith that Uncle Sam can successfully conduct social engineering abroad." No more "social engineering" than helping tyrannized people to establish constitutionally limited governments is contemplated here. America's support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders led to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But would it have been better to have just left the Soviets to do as they wanted there?

Christopher Hitchens is right that none of us has perfect foresight. But a more engaged policy along the lines being discussed here -- one in which the U.S. trained cadres of Afghans who then returned to their country after it was liberated from the Soviets -- might have derailed the Taliban's rise to power. Our shortsighted policy was to get the Soviets out, then hope that free market democracy would develop naturally. It didn't work.

"Is libertarianism protected by state power?" Hitchens asks. If he means, "Is libertarianism protected by a constitutionally limited government enforcing the rule of law equally among its citizens?," well, yes, that's the idea. Of course, the U.S. today is not a libertarian utopia, but it is certainly not the sort of arbitrary tyranny under which hundreds of millions still groan across the globe. I will forego Christopher Hitchens' invitation to refight the constitutional legalities of the Civil War, but the liberation of the slaves was a moral imperative, period. It also is worth noting that if a nation could not continue half-slave and half-free, neither should we expect the globe to continue half-slave and half-free. It is true that the federal government never fell back to its antebellum size, but habeas corpus and press freedom were restored. I wholeheartedly agree with Hitchens that there is no tradeoff between freedom and security. The chief domestic benefit of a libertarian foreign policy would be that, with the development of a world of liberal commercial republics, Americans could not be bamboozled into supporting intrusive measures like the USA PATRIOT Act.

The bottom line is that a libertarian foreign policy ultimately recognizes that support for genuine freedom fighters is the best self-defense.